In my life as a novelist, I’ve been influenced by familiar names: Proust and Knausgaard, Fitzgerald and DeLillo. But for the last four years, my literary hero has been a more unlikely artist: Jalen Brunson.
Brunson, who has carried the New York Knicks within two wins of their first NBA championship since 1973, may be the most improbable sports superstar alive today. He stands at just over six feet. His arms aren’t riddled with the muscle of his teammates. He was a high school star who was told he was too small to succeed in college, a college star who was told he was too small to succeed in the NBA. He was named by Sporting News as the best college basketball player of the decade and passed over in the draft by 28 of 30 NBA teams. His first team, the Dallas Mavericks, balked at committing a modest salary to Brunson even after he helped lead them to the conference finals. He’s the “good, not great” player Stephen A. Smith complained the Knicks were overpaying when he arrived in New York. He is too small, too slow, too bereft of God-given athleticism.
Yet here is Brunson slashing, spinning, pausing, pivoting, head-faking his way to the sliver of space he needs to release his shot, and to the best chance the Knicks have had at a championship in two generations. To watch Jalen Brunson transform a basketball game is to feel that anything is possible. And how did he get here? Footwork, fundamentals, and taking seriously the advice given by the Holy Ghost to Jean-Paul Sartre, recounted in Sartre’s memoir, Words: “You will write,” the Holy Ghost said to me. “What is there, Lord, that you should choose me?” “Nothing special.” “But how shall I write?” “Through diligence.”
Brunson is the athlete we all grow up wanting to be. He’s the story we tell ourselves as kids sweating through shooting and ballhandling drills in the driveway: perseverance is enough.
I was smaller and slower than most boys my age, but spent whole days practicing basketball at our house in the woods in upstate New York. I’ve never done anything in my life as well as I shot a basketball between the ages of 10 and 13. I won four consecutive local MVPs and more than once outscored an opposing team. At the summer camp run by Knicks forward Anthony Mason I won a shooting contest by making 32 consecutive threes. I had one dream: To one day play for my beloved New York Knicks. But with each season I found myself even smaller relative to my peers, and my career ended on the bench at 15. How could I not see in Jalen Brunson the story I had fantasized for my own life, that my dedication to the game could make up for what I lacked in natural gifts?
That is fandom: the illusion that when Brunson scores, we all score; that his story is our story. We can’t actually imagine what it feels like to be Jalen Brunson. I can’t conceive of a life in which I grew from one of the best players in town at 12 to the best player in the state in high school, the best player in the nation in college, the best player in the NBA on this historic playoff run. For most of us, it’s inconceivable to succeed so completely at our childhood love. But we can understand diligence. We can understand what Brunson means when he says, “The magic is in the work.”
Brunson is the literary idol every writer needs—a patron saint of tenacity, a reminder that talent, however apportioned by birth or fate, is always the junior partner to the work itself. As Philip Roth said of himself, quoting the boxer Joe Louis, the measure of a career is whether “I did the best I could with what I had.”
